Homecoming

Baby (Adam) Ant's Dad, Sgt. John Grice has just arrived home from Iraq. Welcome home! Photo Dayton Daily News.

RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS...

We Are hot and bitchy in the Big City today. Critical of God, that stupid little shit with the scraggly beard who just got elected (maybe…) in Iran, and of Michael Jackson whose sobby memorials on TV and the Internet are blotting out my real heroine Farah Fawcett, and the rest of my favorite programs. I have just found out that the owner of my building is selling it sometime in the future. It is a long way away but I am initially consumed by anxiety. Probably it is just too flucking hot and my ass is sore, who knows?

My sister-in-law Cindy died. Tuesday. She had breast cancer. We waiting relatives went down the winding path with phone messages, “We’ve got it – we can reconstruct – oops! There’s a little spot here but we think we can get it, oops! Another spot here – we will try experimental treatment – She’s in Hospice and is not expected………..” Any of you who have had loved ones or friends die of cancer know this dance.

So I’m going to a funeral Monday which is one of those things you do not want to attend, is inconvenient, makes you feel bad, makes you want to go back up the highway where everything is presumably normal.

My friends here have noticed that I am not in my usual giddy, funny, calm, frame of mind. Not that I’m not wearing my anger and impatience like a flag. (I am the last to know…). Somebody came over the other night with a couple packs of cigarettes and a helping hand. Somebody else is financing my gas and meals and whatever else the day of the funeral. And will not take no for an answer. So I said yes. All kinds of people have sincerely offered anything, and they mean it. And one good friend convinced me a couple days ago that it is as blessed to receive as to give and it won’t kill my pride to let people help me.

So I am going to do that. I asked a friend to help install an air conditioner in the front of the house which may help the mood in quantum. I am taking it easy, hiding in the bedroom and the kitchen – which are air conditioned – and reading good books and drinking chocolate milk. Smoking my pipe. Simple things. I need to be simple right now. I can get complicated in a week or so when it’s time. But not so complicated that I forget that my friends are my real treasure, they always have been. And let them carry part of my burden for awhile. Ta!

BOTTORFF, Cynthia "Cindy" (Byrd) age 50 of Hamilton, OH; lost her battle with breast cancer on Tuesday June 23, 2009 at Hospice of Hamilton. Cindy was born in Dayton, OH on November 26, 1958 to Floyd and Nancy (Rickard) Byrd. She was a member of Post 71 AMVETS and Aerie 3680 of the Eagles of Fairfield. Cindy is survived by her husband of 16 years Nick Bottorff; 2 sons Randy Forman and Joshua Forman; one step son Sean Bottorff; 3 grandchildren; 3 sisters Lisa Byrd, Debbie Combs (Kevin), and Jennifer Green (Terry); and many nieces and nephews. Funeral services are Monday June 29, 2009 at 11am at Anderson Funeral Home 1357 E. 2nd St Franklin, OH with Rev. Max Fernandez officiating. Burial will be in Butler County Memorial Park. Visitation will be Sunday from 6-8pm at the funeral home. In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the Susan B. Kohmen Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

RESIDENCY

In this City from 1987 until yesterday, employees of the City were required to live within the City limits. I lived in the City at the time and I still do, by choice. I am also retired and have no school age children. City administrators in the 80’s touted the advantages of a vote for a residency requirement to be pretty much that people who lived in the City they worked in were more responsible, more energetic, more productive than if they hit the freeway to their house in the suburbs at five every evening. Funny, I always thought it had to do with a day’s work for a day’s pay – or a work ethic that mandated that I perform certain tasks daily, for a certain salary, no matter where I happened to live. Apparently that was too old fashioned a concept. “Wouldn’t you rather have your Police Officer live in your neighborhood?” one ad asked.

So we got residency from the voters and we got:

- workers’ families forced to send their children to a school system that was crumbling as school administrators stole money and used Dayton simply as a quick step to better things for themselves.

- relaxed hiring requirements for some public safety officers because there were not enough qualified applicants under the old system within the City limits.

- dedicated and productive employees – and some not so dedicated – being observed and followed by private detectives hired by the City if there were suspicions that they lived even five hundred feet over the line.

Now the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that residency was never a valid concept legally. City employees can live wherever they want. And I suspect that, over the next five years or so when the housing market picks up, dribs and drabs of workers are going to steadily move outside the City to more prosperous suburbs with really good school systems. Also, apparently, the City now has some legal obligation to those people who were previously fired for ‘violating’ the residency rule. I gleefully hope it’s a heavy sentence and that those rehired workers come to the job every day and look their supervisors in the eye and say “Gotcha!”

Now, City of Dayton, maybe you can do some real and energetic work in your school system, on crime in neighborhoods, on your tax base, without having to imprison workers in an attempt to shore up the status quo. Time to don your thinking caps for some REAL progress! Ta!

THE FULL MOO.

We Had the full moon yesterday and WHIO TV was advertising itself again as usual – hoping we’d be sure to catch the Series on serial dog killers. I never quite got whether that was dogs killing cereal, people killing dogs or cereal killing people but it made for fantastic advertising. In two days the entire Eastern United States is going to tune in to see what it is all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeZm7KQJT1o

I just got finished reading a book where it said that the reason we have only self stick postage stamps these days is because the Government was putting toxic mind-washing ingredients in the glue on the old style stamps and the Nation was getting sick.

My television is all screwed up now that we have Be-bop TV or whatever that new digital stuff is called. I have twice as many channels now and none of them match the listings. At nine o’ clock I was supposed to see a documentary on biological warfare on 16.3 but there was a world war two mystery instead, and a show about training police dogs on 16.2. Back when I had one channel from that station I used to know just was going on.

Now we will have to wait until more things happen in the Big City so we can write about them. Ta!

The Soldiers and Policemen were smiling....

Black Crowes live in Moscow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtMPlY3duz4"

Ta!